The world’s busiest airline route during the COVID-19 pandemic has been the one-hour flight from Seoul to South Korea’s resort island of Jeju, and even in the chilly winter months, Jeju’s airport is packed. Outside the terminal, electric Hyundai and Renault Samsung taxis idle silently, their blue license plates identifying them as battery-powered vehicles.
From the airport, a drive to mountain resorts on Hallasan or the luxury beach enclave Seogwipo takes visitors along the coasts, where nearly 100 windmills churn in the island’s notorious ocean gusts. Add in the solar panels that dot rooftops of houses and resorts, and it is easy to get the impression that Jeju could be well on its way to powering the entire island with renewable energy.
Island policymakers made that an official goal about a decade ago. Jeju would become completely independent of fossil fuels by 2030. Wind and water are abundant, and there is no heavy industry to rehabilitate.
Illustration: Mountain People
It was a bold target, but not an impossible one, officials thought.
If it was successful, it would have much to teach the rest of South Korea, which has pledged to cut emissions by 40 percent from 2018 levels by 2030 on the way to climate neutrality by 2050.
However, more than halfway through its initiative, Jeju is way behind.
As of last month, the island produced only a small fraction of the clean energy it needed, and some of it still went to waste.
Electric vehicles (EVs) are not replacing gasoline-powered vehicles quickly enough.
From 2009 to 2019, the latest data available, the island’s carbon emissions rose 13 percent.
“We really thought at the beginning that the Carbon-Free Island project could be successful by 2030,” said Woo Keun-min, a former Jeju governor who retired in 2014. “We wanted Jeju to be a beautiful green island full of artists, like Naoshima in Japan.”
Islands like Naoshima and Jeju are appealing laboratories for experiments like this. Residents pay high prices for energy that has to travel from the respective mainland and are eager to lower their costs.
Geography plays a role as well. In addition to coastal winds and sunshine, such islands’ circular shape and limited land mass are an advantage for EV adoption.
Hawaii and China’s Hainan have set similar targets. If these projects can be successful, the thinking goes, the efforts can be scaled up and replicated on the mainland.
However, there might be at least as much to learn from failure as from success.
Jeju’s two biggest sources of rising carbon emissions are gasoline-powered vehicles, which accounted for nearly 37 percent in 2019, and fossil fuel-based power generation, which contributed 26 percent, South Korean Ministry of Environment data showed.
To zero out emissions by 2030, the island needed to tackle both at the same time.
The plan called for encouraging EV adoption and more sources of renewable power. It assumed that an increase in both would crowd out traditional vehicles and fuel.
It has not.
About 15 million people visit Jeju every year, more than 20 times the island’s year-around population. Once they get there, most of them rent a vehicle. To encourage residents — and, more importantly, the taxi drivers and the owners of the island’s rental fleets — to go electric, the Jeju offered up to US$12,000 in subsidies plus a US$4,000 tax break, among the country’s most generous incentives for EV adoption.
Until 2019, Jeju offered to install charging stations at EV owners’ homes for free.
The number of EVs has grown. About 6.4 percent of vehicles on the island are now electric, the highest proportion in the country, but it is still far short of the interim goal of 23 percent for this year, which was lowered from the original 2020 target of 30 percent. Nor did those EVs replace the island’s gasoline-powered vehicles, which have doubled in the past decade to 600,000.
Then there is the problem of batteries. As a way to reduce costs for consumers, the Jeju government agreed to own the batteries — the most expensive part of an EV — for vehicles bought after Jan. 1 last year.
Many of those batteries have run their course. There is no local way to get rid of the spent batteries or to recycle them, and shipping them to the mainland is expensive. For now, they are piled up near Hallasan, in a national park near the center of the island.
In the second half of this year, the South Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy is expected to establish standards for a secondary battery market.
When it does, the Jeju Technopark, a Jeju government-run business development agency, aims to help residents trade used batteries and to reuse the packs. Elsewhere, they are used in energy storage or for backup power.
“I thought about buying an EV previously, but gave up after I heard managing a battery is a headache,” said Hong Gyeong-hwa, a 58-year-old Jeju resident who dives to harvest seafood, one of the island’s legendary haenyeo.
If Jeju let residents trade in their used batteries?
“Oh yes,” she said. “If that happens, I’ll buy one.”
Even if all the vehicles on the island ran on electricity, they would not be a truly carbon-neutral option unless the power they use comes from renewable sources.
Geographically, Jeju is the best place in South Korea to harvest wind power, and clean energy has long been a priority. As of now, residents pay the country’s highest energy costs, because they rely on shipped diesel or natural gas.
To power the island solely with renewables, wind and solar capacity needs to rise to 2.3 gigawatts and 1.4 gigawatts respectively.
As of this month, Jeju had installed enough to generate 828 megawatts, just 22 percent of what it says it would need by the end of the decade.
Worse yet, Jeju could not even use all the renewable energy it did produce. Funneling it into the existing power grid could have overloaded the infrastructure, so the island was forced to “curtail,” or release, the excess. More than 19 gigawatt-hours of electricity was lost from curtailments in 2020, the latest figures available from Korea Power Exchange showed, almost 128 times the amount curtailed five years earlier.
“How ironic is it to curtail renewable energy at a time when it’s supposed to ramp up,” said Kim Jeongdo, a policy director at the Korea Federation for Environmental Movement of Jeju. “The government only has a plan to increase renewable energy, but it doesn’t have detailed plans about how it’s going to shun fossil fuel-based power plants.”
The island cannot simply switch off thermal and gas-based generators to accommodate renewable energy because it can make the whole grid unstable, Jeju Future Strategy Bureau head Yoon Hyeong-seok said.
Without an adequate storage facility on the island, there is little the government can do.
To clear the structural hurdles, Jeju has proposed building a smart microgrid system that could minimize the effects of any outage, said Lee Yong-jae, a professor emeritus at Chung-Ang University who has studied Jeju’s project.
However, that runs afoul of state-run Korea Electric Power Corp, the country’s only grid operator. As long as the company’s monopoly remains, microgrids require the approval of the South Korean National Assembly, which is reviewing legislation that would clear that hurdle for Jeju.
Jeju was also chosen as the site of the nation’s biggest energy storage facility. It is expected to cost more than 100 billion won (US$82.6 million) and Seoul is planning to complete it next year.
The rate of curtailment is forecast to rise to about 12 percent of the total installed capacity in 2030 with the expected uptake in wind and solar, the Jeju Research Institute said.
To address this issue, the state-run utility is spending more than 200 billion won to build an undersea cable to send excess electricity to the mainland.
“Jeju’s ambition to become a carbon-zero island is in a big mess, and given the time we have, it’s going to be impossible and unrealistic to achieve the goal by 2030,” Kim said. “Unless the government suddenly pours trillions of won into the project, it’s not going to happen.”
Jeju’s targets are not legally binding. There’s no penalty for missing the 2030 goal.
The governor of Jeju can permit wind power projects, but without central government approval, many of the projects planned by the provincial government and power authority are on hold.
The fact that Jeju is facing stark challenges even absent heavy industry should be a warning for the country, Lee said.
The island is “by far the easiest place in the country to achieve any climate goals, as it doesn’t house any heavy-emitting industries,” he said. “If Jeju fails to achieve the carbon-free island target, Korea will never get anywhere close to its net-zero goal.”
Jeju and other places that aspire to overhaul their energy mix should have set out plans to phase out fossil fuel-based electricity, Lee said.
Politically, that is a harder sell. For South Korea, clean energy would be more expensive than coal, natural gas or nuclear power, at least for the foreseeable future.
“The transition will only be made when the government, companies and the public are willing to bear higher costs for clean energy,” Lee said. “Jeju’s plan should be redesigned based on this notion. Until then, a true transition won’t happen in Jeju — or in South Korea.”
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